PHP, originally an acronym for „Personal Home Page“, today stands recursively for „PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor“. It is a widely used, open-source scripting language that is primarily used for the Web development was designed. PHP code is executed on the server side by a web server using a PHP interpreter, such as the Zend Engine, and generates dynamic HTML content that is sent to the user's browser.
Functionality and features
The main strength of PHP lies in its ability to create dynamic websites. It processes data from web forms, manages user sessions and interacts efficiently with various database systems. Supported databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQLite. PHP scripts are able to generate dynamic content based on user input and manage files on the server, including creation, reading, writing and deletion.
Key features of PHP include:
- Open source and free of charge: PHP is open source and can be downloaded, used and modified free of charge.
- Platform independence: It runs on common operating systems such as Windows, Linux and macOS and is compatible with most web servers such as Apache and Nginx.
- Easy to learn: Due to its syntax, PHP is considered relatively easy to learn, especially for developers who are already familiar with other programming languages.
- Comprehensive ecosystem: A large number of libraries and powerful frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony simplify the development of complex web applications.
- Security functions: The language offers integrated functions for data encryption and supports secure communication protocols such as HTTPS.
A typical PHP script can be written directly in HTML which facilitates the creation of dynamic content. An example of a simple integration:
<!DOCTYPE html<
<html<
<head<
<title<PHP example</title<
</head<
<body<
<h1<Welcome!</h1<
<?php
echo "<p<The current tag is: " . date("d.m.Y") . "</p
</body<
</html<Development and current relevance
PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf and released in June 1995 as „Personal Home Page Tools“. Since then, it has undergone continuous development, with major milestones such as the introduction of PHP 3 in 1998, which was rewritten by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, and the release of the Zend Engine in 1999. PHP 5 brought comprehensive object-oriented programming (OOP) and performance improvements in 2004. The PHP 7.x series, starting in 2015, provided significant performance improvements and new language features.
The further development of PHP is driven by the PHP Development Team and the PHP Foundation. As of October 2025, PHP 8.4 is the current stable and supported version, which was released on November 21, 2024. PHP 8.4.13, a maintenance release, was released on September 25, 2025. The next major release, PHP 8.5, is planned for November 2025. Despite the emergence of other server-side languages such as Node.js and Python, PHP remains a fundamental part of the web, powering an estimated 74 % of all websites. This underlines its continued importance for dynamic web applications and Content management systems like WordPress.
